Costilla County fights for resources while battling blaze
The seven staffers within the Costilla County administration office are pulling 12- to 16-hour days trying to manage all that goes along with one of the largest wildfires in Colorado history igniting in their small, resource-scarce county.
“We have such a small staff,” said Ben Doon, the county’s chief administrative officer. “If I need to take a break, it’s hard to find someone within the county with my knowledge of things to take my place. It’s the ninth day of this with no sign of letting up.”
As emergency operation teams and incident management teams from across the state rally to help Costilla County fight the Spring Creek fire now burning more than 103,300 acres, Doon and his crew are trying to deal with the locals who want to learn whether their homes are destroyed from a familiar face rather than an outsider.
“We’re getting great resources from more counties, but there are certain things that
only the people who know Costilla County can do,” Doon said. “It’s like someone is needed practically 24 hours a day and no one can work 24 hours a day.”
With nearly a dozen fires raging in the state, the fight for resources, information and employees can seem like a never-ending battle. Support systems across the country try to ensure the battle is less of a tugof-war and more of a fair allocation based on which fire is posing the most danger.
Larry Helmerick of the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center is a busy man these days helping determine which fire resources get sent where.
“Basically, if the fire is close to people and critical infrastructure, we send a lot of stuff,” Helmerick said.
The chain of command begins with volunteer fire departments who typically arrive first at the scene of a blaze, Helmerick said. If they need help, they’d call up a local dispatch center in Pueblo, Fort Collins, Craig, Durango, Grand Junction, Wyoming or South Dakota. The center closest to the fire in question would start coordinating help in the form of crews, engines, helicopters, air tankers and more.
When crews battling the Lake Christine fire in Eagle County called for backup, the coordination center sent two helicopters and seven air tankers the night it ignited, Helmerick said. The Rocky Mountain Area Coordination center went to preparedness Level 4 on Wednesday.
“That means that we are in a really heightened state of response on a national level,” Helmerick said. “We are ranked highest among all the regional dispatch centers across the nation. We try to take care of everything within our geographic area, but when we’re in this kind of condition, we have national assets here to help us fight the fires.”
Sending out help in terms of needs can be an equalizer when it comes to a county’s wealth. “You could be the richest or the poorest county,” Helmerick said. “We don’t care. We’ll come.”
Costilla County is daunted by dollar signs. Doon has to worry about the significant amount of overtime employees are working and how paying them what they deserve will impact the county. The county’s general fund is $3.5 million.
The chief administrative officer worries about the county’s property value, too.
“These are gated communities with very nice homes and property values and they’re getting wiped out,” Doon said. “Our property assessment will take a huge hit. We’re scared to see what our property value is going to look like.”
That kind of dedication is also instilled in Caley Fisher, spokeswoman for the Colorado Division of Fire and Prevention Control. She helps coordinate resources and information between government offices and civilians.
“Right now, it’s just the amount of people that want information — it can be hard to keep up,” Fisher said.
When residents trying to decide between evacuating and hunkering down can’t reach their local command center for fire information, Fisher often gets their call.
On Fisher’s way home from work last night around 7 p.m., she got a call from a crying woman who lived near the Lake Christine fire and couldn’t decide whether to evacuate or not. Fisher pulled over on the side of the road, pulled out her laptop, typed in the woman’s coordinates and started sharing relevant information about the nearness of the fire and which way it was expected to move.
“Once she was able to hear where the fire was and what to do and where to go, you could feel the sense of ease come over her and that was really awesome,” Fisher said. “She ended up getting her and her dogs out a little early. I am so, so happy to help those people.”